We love reality television. Not so much for the colorful content that allows us to shut our brains off, but for the wealth of material it offers to help us explain how the retail real estate process works.

So in today’s episode newsletter, we’ll turn to Selling Sunset and The Bachelor* because even though Selling Sunset is the show about real estate, you actually want to approach your retail real estate deal like you’re on The Bachelor.

In Selling Sunset (and residential real estate), successful tours always end with, “if you want this house, you need to put in an offer today because tomorrow might be too late!” There is time pressure to commit NOW lest you lose the opportunity entir...

Let’s say that Dolly Parton is hosting a party and you’re the guest of honor. All eyes will be on you. You have to find the perfect outfit, duh. Your outfit has to match the vibe of the event, you need to feel fantastic in it, and you know that the general public will see the photos and feel quite confident expressing their opinions until the end of time.

🛍  Where would you go to find this outfit? 

You’d go to a store where a knowledgeable human being will work one-on-one with you to show you options that match your requirements, where they will help you in the fitting room to assess what can and cannot be tailored, and where they can pull stock from the back that just arrived, or fr...

Every new Pedal Retailer comes into the First Location Program in a different place – some have a crystal clear vision of their business in the space we’ll secure together, and for others, it’s hazy. For most people, the vision is partly hazy with some very clear spots.


When Pedal Retailer Jessica started FLP to find a brick-and-mortar home for Jurisdiction, her online women’s clothing boutique, she was on the clearer side of the spectrum.

She knew her target market and customer intimately – she was her own target customer, and the pain of trying to shop in her hometown of Potomac, MD was a constant frustration for her and her friends. Jessica grew up in Potomac, so she was not...

Tomorrow is Valentine's Day. So as a prepared parent, I ordered a “classroom” box of Ring Pop Tongue Painters for my daughter’s third grade class. Yes, I Amazoned the purchase. Yes, these “tongue painters” probably have some gross chemicals in them. Don’t judge me. Sometimes I eat Doritos, too.

These “classroom” Ring Pops come in packaging that allows you to Sharpie on each kid’s name, which I suppose makes the distribution more personal. I didn’t spend the extra $8 on the matching cards that let your kid write individual notes. Alice had to write “unique and specific” notes to each of her classmates in second grade, and it was a reeeeeeaaaaal challenge for a girl who inherited my mother-...

Let’s talk about landlords.

Often when we start considering retail spaces, Pedal Retailers express some version of this concern about large, corporate landlords: won’t they try to take advantage of us as a small business?

The image in their minds is that corporate landlords are like this:

While individual or mom-and-pop landlords are like this:

But having worked on more deals than any human should, we know that in many cases, the big corporate landlords can actually be like this:

And that mom-and-pop landlords can also be like this:

It makes total sense for small retailers (especially those navigating brick-and-mortar for the first time) to assume that corporate landlo...

I’ve been thinking a lot these past few months about how retail really exists on the front lines of American culture and society. I’m no economist, but I think it has to do with the fact that how we choose to spend (or not spend) money is a real-time reflection of our priorities and preferences. Put all of us together making many small financial decisions (and transactions) on a daily and weekly basis, and the impact is hard to ignore.

Retail takes it in the face first.

Let’s think of some of the recent cultural “events,” and let’s exclude COVID. We’re all painfully aware of how the retail industry was first in line to be decimated by COVID, but that’s a circumstance that is ...

Okay, before we start, let me just acknowledge how much I hate the fact that I’m using a woman’s aging as the centerpiece of this article, but you all already know that I do my part in smashing the patriarchy AND I love a perfect metaphor. So here we are.

I saw this meme the other day about how Anne Hathaway looks pretty much exactly like she did 20 years ago. Now we all know why that’s the case, right? Clearly the woman won the genetic lottery, but she’s also been “investing” in maintaining her 19-year-old face since she was 19.

Now I’m sure this meme was trying to sell me something to stick in or on my face, but do you know what the image mashup made ME think of? You guessed it. Reta...